Watch This Eerie Trailer For A Doc About The White Supremacist Takeover Of A North Dakota Town

This documentary isn’t finished yet, but I couldn’t resist posting it, because the story’s interesting and the trailer is eerie as hell. Back in 2012, a guy named Craig Cobb moved into a ghost town in North Dakota called Leith (pronounce Leeth), which had between 16 and 24 residents, depending on who you ask.

May of 2012, Cobb moved in and started buying up property. He accumulated twelve plots of land, some empty, some with houses in various states of disrepair. People figured he’d moved in to be close to the Bakken oil fields some 70 miles north. Turns out he was a notorious white separatist who was plotting a takeover of the city government. Shortly after his plans were unveiled, a family of fellow white separatists moved in to start fixing up his properties. [Vimeo]

[Cobb] is using Craigslist and white power message boards to entice others in the movement to take refuge in Leith, about two hours southwest of Bismarck. On one board, he detailed his vision for the community — an enclave where residents fly “racialist” banners, where they are able to import enough “responsible hard core” white nationalists to take control of the town government, where “leftist journalists or antis” who “come and try to make trouble” will face arrest.

That clearly hasn’t worked yet, or else a couple of filmmakers from Brooklyn wouldn’t be hawking their documentary about it. If Cobb looks or sounds familiar, by the way, it might because he was the white supremacist who found out he had 14 percent “Sub Saharan African DNA” on The Trisha Show (note: I have no idea what that is) last year. In another fine bit of poetic justice, it turns out that some of the nice white separatists Cobb invited to Leith ended up vandalizing his house after his Trisha Show appearance went viral.

According to local prosecutors, after other white supremacists in Leith learned that Cobb possessed “sub-Sarahan African” DNA, one of them — currently not identified by name by the police — spray-painted “BACK IN BLACK” on Cobb’s house. Grant County Assistant State’s Attorney Todd Schwarz told the Los Angeles Times that the man “painted on the house, ‘BACK IN BLACK,’ and he’s not an AC/DC fan.”

Oh please, everyone‘s an AC/DC fan. Also, that graffiti is rather indirect and ambiguous for a group of people you generally see sieg-heiling and shouting “n*gger.” Nonetheless, the graffiti led Cobb and a follower to go on a “patrol” of the town carrying guns, which got Cobb and his accomplice, Kynan Dutton, arrested on charges of terrorizing. His cash-only bail was set a $1 million, with the judge noting that Cobb was a flight risk on account of already being a fugitive from charges of inciting hate in Canada. The Leith City Council (which I can only assume includes almost everyone in the town) also voted to enact zoning restrictions to keep Cobb and followers from squatting on his property without sewage or running water (Cobb’s property has neither).

One of the problems with these guys is that virtually their entire ideology is based on a persecution complex, which is preposterous in a vacuum, but becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when they start doing things like trying to take over towns and acting as their own police force (I suppose a similar thing happened to Hitler, didn’t it?). I don’t really know what the solution is. Don’t push back? That doesn’t really help either. I guess that’s why I moved to a city, where the obnoxious white people carry clipboards and soy lattes instead of rifles.

Speaking as someone that lives in Wyoming and has dealt with guys like that I can honestly say that this seems way more pathetic than it does scary, considering that they have to go to godforsaken rural North Dakota to find their “White Haven”.

Enjoy the rotting barns and one defunct Subway franchise you racist fart holes.

You are right on when it comes to Texas. I was born, grew up, and still live here. It really is a hidden thing, I see it a lot because I’m lily white. Other people will take you aside and say something because they can say it to another white person, but not out loud. There isn’t a month that goes by that my will to live drains out by some comment from a person here.

Yeah I’m in “liberal” MN, in a suburb of Minneapolis. A lot of people are progressive and liberal and appreciative of cultural diversity, but a lot of people aren’t. I joke a lot of times that the city and county I live in might as well be 1960’s Alabama because of the whispered, passive-aggressive racism that comes from the most unlikely of mouths.

I live in Bethlehem, PA, a place with a large non-white population… one night at the bar, the really, really attractive white bartender just started letting fly with the racial epithets as though I was OK with it because I’m white. I really wasn’t OK with it and mentioned that… she hasn’t spoken to me since.

As a life long Mid-Westerner living in Iowa, there is a certain amount of “keeping an ear to the ground” that I have maintained about the surrounding states for all of my adult life. My experience has been, hands down, that the Dakotas are just getting creepy and weird compared to the rest of the region.

I would have to pull the data (and I will if someone really fucking squawks about it), but another glaring idiosyncratic characteristic that has cropped up in the past 15-20 years in at least one (possibly both) of the Dakotas is the tremendously accelerated decay of education achievement. I recently read an article (again, I can find it if someone wants to call BS) that showed high school graduation rates (I believe) in the bottom ten states. One of the Dakotas was on that list.

I could go on and on, easiest example being their aggressive anti-abortion legislation, but simply put: I am 37 years old, live in Iowa, and everything around me seems essentially ok except when I look to the near NW.

It’s a strange place. The pattern has historically been boom and bust there, as there weren’t many resources and exports, so people would attempt to farm it, realize it wasn’t a great place to farm, and then leave after a generation or so of struggle. And now it’s in the midst of an oil boom, so it’s starting to be like a 19th century mining town. Lots of unique demographic quirks going on up there.

As someone who has lived in and around farming communities in North Dakota for 32 years, Vince, I can confirm that you’re about half right. While there was a mass exodus going on here ten years ago, it was mostly at the expense of small towns dying as the bigger towns (cities?) continued to grow. It was never really about the farmers. Most of ND east of the Badlands is rich crop land and these farms just get passed down from generation to generation. A lot of this land is owned by the same families that homesteaded it. That said, ND has had a longtime problem of attracting technological jobs and keeping young people in the state. At least, that was the big concern 7-8 years ago. Now, with the Bakken oil boom, the population is booming right along with it (especially Fargo and Bismarck, along with, obviously, oil country in the western edge of the state), and most (white, old) people are not at all happy with the “riff-raff” moving in. So people are already edgy about “ousiders” moving in and upsetting their little applecarts. Which makes this Leith thing all the more interesting to me. I mean, there is a lot of closet racism here (think “Minnesota-nice style), so just imagine how big of an asshole you have to be to not be able to appeal to fellow racists. It’s actually been pretty funny to watch this tiny town come together and just put the boots to these separatists. Confusing, but hilarious.

Fek, don’t lump us in with South Dakota. There is no relation there. They’re the ones with the horseshit academic standards. We’re actually pretty good. We also have the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, a state bank, and a shitload of money, so the term “Dakotas” has got to go, and so do I because I’m starting to sound like the PR ambassador for the state of ND.

But yeah, anyway, this Leith situation was always prime material for a documentary. Glad someone is making it.

I like the setting, except, there is no mystery to this situation whatsoever. And the “crimes” in Leith have largely been invented, because the only alternative means of getting rid of this guy was burning down his house.

The thing that stops people like this is education and infrastructure. Thats why you dont see people like this crop up in well educated, large populated areas. They show up in dying towns where the youth have to be bused two hours to a school and where people cant get work. These people come in and they give the hardships of the downtrodden a face and a focus for their anger and ignorance.

The American Taliban shrieks in its death rattle. They will pass on soon enough. Time will cleanse the country of the resistance to the future and time’s inevitable advancement of human compassion. May the Void absorb their hatred.

It’s already over. There were only, like, four people to begin with and the main guy has been in jail for three months with an outrageous bond. His dopey sidekick just rolled over on him for a reduced bond last week, too, so it’s game-set-match and Leith can soon go back to being Nowheresville, USA.

We in north Dakota hate these fucking people and hope they either die or get out. I don’t live in Leith but a friend of mines Aunt owns a bar there and has banned these people from entering it. A couple of them also recently got arrested for putting a gun to a man’s face.

Why not just inject a bunch of cash into the town, so it actually starts to look like things are working to attract more of them? Then more will follow. And when it reaches a reasonable capacity drop a dome on them and recoup the money you injected by filming what happens inside as reality TV.